Why British train enthusiasts hate this man - Dr. Beeching's Railway Axe
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- Опубликовано: 26 янв 2023
- In todays video, we take a look at one Mr Doctor Richard Beeching, the man who ripped up a third of Britain's railways with nothing but a pen and paper
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Oh, I still have all my railways, the axe goes chop, chop, chop,
If Dr.Beeching gets a swing, my railway will come off
And if he gets a swing, steam will get fased out, but all the same we play this game cause thats what its all about.
Being an Amtrak fan, a lot of those who like and/or care about Amtrak, hate Richard Anderson, since he did, or at least was attempting to do sort of the same things Beeching did, even though Anderson only made it as far as to make food & beverage cuts, & only one train service Was stopped (Mainly because the state that was keeping the train going, didn't want to keep it going anymore, not because of Anderson). Whenever I hear about Dr. Beeching, I always wonder if what happened to British Rail under Beeching was what Anderson was wanting to do to Amtrak.
‘Oh, i got all my branchlines, the axe goes chop chop chop. If i miss the spaces in between my branchlines will come off.
And if i hit my branchlines, the cash will soon flow out, but its the same when we play this game cuz thats what its all about’
Thanks for another great video, although not going into great detail I really got a great overview of the modernization plan. Me and a few friends made a video on a line that was closed by Beeching's cuts ruclips.net/video/QJvkKxKDRgk/видео.html
You still have the clipping in your intro audio.
Lets be real here folks, while Beeching was certainly not innocent in all this, Ernest Marples was far more to blame for what happened to British Rail than Beeching ever was.
i mean, it don't help when your name is on the study
Marples had practically nothing to do with the follow up to the Beeching report as he was out of his job soon after. Maybe save your misplaced anger for the real culprit: Barbara Castle of Labour who was the one who ripped up thousands of miles of track and destroyed infrastructure.
Beeching was the project manager appointed by Marples to complete a pre-ordained contraction of the railways that was already well underway. Beeching did not wield an axe, he was the axe wielded by Marples in the interests of the very powerful road transport lobby. Putting his name on the report was an act of arrogance that enabled the self-interested politicians to distance themselves from their dirty work.
@@nigelhudson1948 Oh dear Nigel so many trigger words and not one fact.
But OK lets use your rhetoric:
Beeching was brought in to 'axe' the losses being made by BR. So he 'axed' unprofitable and little used services and made his report in March '63. I remember it well and I was 16and starting work. My family worked in GWR - Grandad was a driver, two uncles were signalmen and Aunties were ticket office ladies. So truct me I knew what Beeching did. Especially in his second report in '65.
Marples just accepted the first report and let the BR Board get on with cutting services. However Beeching NEVER proposed lifting tracks in either report. That was the action taken by Labour post the '64 election. In fact on the Oxford to Cambridge Varsity Line he specifically objected to its lifting but was overruled by Labour's class war against two university cities.
Get angry at the real culprits Nigel. It was not Beeching or Marples who actually saved BR and created InterCity, Freightliner and Intermodal freight.
He still gets the blame as well because he was very incompetent in his job as well.
Fun fact: Wilbert Awdry, creator of the Railway Series, wrote that only a single halt on Sodor was affected by the Beeching Axe, and said halt was reopened by the 1990’s. Paints a pretty funny picture of the Fat Controller and Beeching being bitter rivals.
Edit: The only reason he did this is because he couldn't fit that station on his portable model layout of the line it was on.
I imagine that the Fat Controller sending Beeching packing for even mentioning to scrap any useful steamer just for cars
@@Tomlar147 The funny thing is that Sodor Roadways, the main company that provides bus and road freight haulage services across the island, is actually a subsidiary of the North Western Railway.
@@primrosevale1995 Big brained move right there by the Hatts. Can’t be out-competed by roads, no matter how inefficient your rail business is, if you own the roads too. Wonder how they skirted regulators on having a virtual monopoly over the island’s transportation though. Maybe they argued the NWR was a heritage line?
@@GintaPPE1000 Apparently the timetables of the buses are co-ordinated to make connections with all trains possible, forming more of a cohesive network. Not to mention Sodor Roadways also has connections to towns the railway doesn’t as well as to the narrow-gauge Skarloey Railway.
This is Thomas worldbuilding I had no idea of!
It's actually very sad. The UK had such a dense railway network! A push to the right direction and it could have become something similar to Switzerland.
Switzerland is a great example. Nobody cares if their rail is making profit.
Ugh I know. Criminal under-investment
@@countluke2334 That couldn't be farther from the truth. Swiss being Swiss, we care a lot if the railway makes money. Swiss railway had record profits in the years before the pandemic. We do close unprofitable lines and stations, but we also have a healthy debate about small lines being necessary to make the profitable lines profitable. The convenience of having a S-Bahn station in walking distance, or at least a bus station connecting to the S-Bahn, makes many commuters choose public transport in the first place. And while that station, or that feeder bus may not be profitable in itself, it isn't a big extra cost and it grows the business for the profitable lines. If the net effect is positive, the small line is worth keeping.
@Eljan Rimsa but that's what I meant. Those lines serving the remotest villages will never be profitable on their own. Yet that's the only thing Beeching and many countries, including Germany, look at. Privatising railroads contributes to that as that means the profitable lines may be owned by another company than the branch lines.
@kitfaaace Investment implies there would actually be a pay-off, there wouldn't be.
The biggest mistake was not protecting the track beds from redevelopment.
You have the very corrupt Ernest Marples to thank for that. He got Beeching to close railways - then his companies made them into roads.
The island of Sodor was never the same.
It doesn't exist, idiot
Actually, Sodor has been doing fine despite Beeching, according to the Railway Series. Duck even joked saying "we reopen branches!" when his branch line opened.
The Island of Sodor was lucky.
True
FR💀💀💀💀
I like travelling by train but wouldn't describe myself as an enthusiast. I'm old enough (just) to remember the railway system pre-Beeching. Family friends lived near one of the axed branch lines in Devon. After the cuts we rarely stayed with them in the holidays. Beeching didn't take into account how it would affect people's jobs and local industries. A lot of seasonal income (not just seaside holidays) was lost overnight. Market gardens as well as cut flower nurseries that relied on trains to quickly transport their goods to the cities became uneconomical. Instead of HS2, it would revitalise rural areas to bring back branch lines, particularly as deregulation of bus services meant loss of public transport. Even today more public transport services are being lost.
They did not do the assessment of use of lines and stations during the holiday season.
@@digitallifeline162 Plus they lied about profitability too. The whole thing was shameful.
Why not both HS2 and branch lines? ;)
@@Phambleton exactly. Reopening closed lines is hugely important, and almost every time it’s been done it’s a success, but the trunk line is over capacity too. We need both.
We’ve just been so starved of investment for 60-odd years, and now each interest is fighting over the proverbial final loaf of bread for today. Which of course suits the Tories’ interests just fine, as they cut public spending even more, making everyone even more desperate for scraps.
Don't know the history, but at least the Newquay and St. Ives branch lines are still running. Thank goodness!
This act arguably killed the cultural fabric that made Britain such a legendarily productive and cohesive community in the first place. Close knit community ties and routes used for a century, closed in exchange for soulless motorways that funneled everyone in to now overcrowded cities.
Which was probably the underlying motive.
@@eddiewillers1
It was, but it wasn't Beeching's motive. He wanted to reopen the closed lines once finances improved. However, his boss, Ernest Marples, owned a road construction company, and it was Marples who then ordered the closed lines torn up.
And now we need to use the hard shoulders of our motorways.
So close knit those same communities droves places and each train carried 3 or 4 people a journey on many branch lines. Stop romanticising. You’d be the first to complain about high taxes.
You say this completely ignoring the culturial importance of Britans motorways and roads
As others have mentioned, the real villain in all this was Ernest Marples, a transport minister who had massive financial conflicts of interest through his involvement in road building. Beeching did what he was asked to do and halted the haemorrhaging of money from British Railways. He was responsible for improvements, one of the most significant being the development of the Freightliner container network - a decision that turned out to very far sighted indeed. For a balanced view of Beeching, read "I tried to run a railway." by Gerald Fiennes written by a senior BR manager who worked under Beeching.
what garbage, labour were in power and closed the lines , please ge your facts correct
Oh look another Gricer blaming Marples and peddling the same lies and innuendos as the others.
Marples at the time he became Transport Minister sold all his shares and he had resigned from the board many years earlier when he was first elected an MP. No contracts were awarded to Marples Ridgway when he was Transport Minister and certainly not the M1 as most people suggest. Because MR did no work on the M1 in those years. Indeed MR was taken over in 1964 by the Bath and Portland Group.
As for the rest of your comment you are absolutely correct and its a shame you coloured an otherwise excellent comment with the usual Marples rubbish.
@@1chish And Trump had no involvment in his property business whilst President. Right?
@@jonathanwetherell3609 I neither know nor care Pal. Trump was a class one idiot and the Yanks got what they deserved. But he means diddley to me being a Brit.
Are there any further irrelevancies you wish to share?
It's more complicated than you've suggested. The Beeching report was commissioned by the Macmillan government, but it was mainly implemented by the subsequent Wilson government, which had ample opportunity to ignore Beeching's proposals if they'd chosen to do so. In the end, despite having criticized Beeching's plans when in opposition, they were forced to enact them because the economic realities were unavoidable. The real villains go back much further. An early culprit was the Attlee government which decided to rebuild the railways using steam traction after WW2 (in order to "protect jobs"), rather than electrifying the network, as other countries were doing. This error was then compounded by a later Conservative government which made a "dash for diesel" in the mid 1950s using unproven and hastily-produced British locomotives (again to protect jobs). It wasn't until the 1960's that serious electrification began to appear, and even then extremely slowly. Moreover, for historical reasons (mainly related to the haphazard nature of its evolution), the British rail network had a huge amount of duplication and underused capacity, much of which had never been paid its way, even in its heyday. Indeed, the network was already haemorrhaging money at the time of the Big Four. Poor old Beeching has been damned for stating the bleedin' obvious; whereas, in reality, successive generations of railway operators had allowed the network to become hopelessly uneconomic. Marples makes a convenient scapegoat, especially has he later faced criminal charges, but in reality the die was cast long before he appeared on the scene.
I’d say Ernest Marples is the bigger villain in this tale. Beeching merely wanted to temporarily close a lot of those lines until finances improved. Marples tore them up because he owned a road construction company
Actually that is the usual misplaced load of old left wing, rail enthusiast romanticist bollocks. Marples never ripped up any tracks given the first Beeching report was not published until March 1963 and the Tory Government (and therefore Marples) left office in October 1964. Services were cut but no tracks were lifted.
The real culprits of the biggest act of infrastructure vandalism were Tom Fraser and Barbara Castle (and possibly Richard Marsh) of Labour who DID rip up the tracks as described and then went further when Beeching's second report was published in February 1965 when Castle was in charge until 1968.
And Marples did not own a road construction company either as he had already sold his shares as is usual when people are made Ministers.
Do try to read more and write less.
Similar applies to Tim Eyman in Washington State in the U.S., that bastard has been a sorespot in our state's transportation infrastructure (railroad and highway.)
Barbara Castle as transport minister closed as many as Marples
Marples was typical of tory politicians, they would sell us like livestock if they make money off us. They destroyed this country.
@@andrewince8824 Oh dear lord a Socialist Liberal Leftie is here to share his wisdom.
Marples did not rip up tracks Andrew. That was the work of Fraser, Castle and others who were LABOUR politicians you blinkered idiot.
If you want to have a debate about who has destroyed our country by all means bring THAT on but be prepared for a factual demolition.
Oh, Doctor Beeching what have you done?
There once were lots of trains to catch, but soon there will be none,
I'll have to buy a bike, 'cos i can't afford a car,
Oh, Doctor Beeching what a naughty man you are!
I live and grew up in a small East Anglian town wich used to have a huge Victorian railway station. The bane of my teenage life was the terrible rail connections and equally as bad bus connections. I didn’t know about Mr Beeching until now but his his decisions and ramifications clearly has long-lasting results.
Different region but identical experience. When I’d learned there used to be a train right to the nearest city, and a connection to go to the next 6 nearest cities, versus the convoluted mess to do that route today it really pissed me off
The spiteful way in which this was implemented is what really sticks in the throat for a lot of people. There was no provision for mothballing for instance just a full on tear it all down approach.
FunFact: Beeching proposed the cutting of services and jobs but never ever proposed the lifting of tracks as he knew that would lose railway rights. It was the Labour Government post 1964 (a year after his first report) that ripped up tracks and destroyed infrastructure 'to save money'.
@@1chish This is what the national archives have to say :
Initially, Harold Wilson's Labour government continued with the policy of closing uneconomic lines, although it came under increasing pressure from backbenchers. In 1966, a White Paper on Transport Policy identified economic utility, rather than commercial viability, as the major objective of railway policy. This resulted in a revised railway network plan with 3,000 miles of additional track surviving Beecham's scheme.
@@vespasian606 Sorry your point was what exactly? Beeching returned to ICI in June 1965 and you are quoting something from 1966?
It seems you have not understood my main point which was that Beeching cut SERVICES. It was the Labour Government that destroyed TRACKS and lost railway rights. So this report in 1966 was suggesting "3,000 miles of additional track surviving Beeching's scheme" while failing to understand that Beeching never once suggested lifting those tracks.
So lest look at that vandalism:
Tory Government post Beeching:
1963 324 miles (521 km)
Labour Government:
1964 1,058 miles (1,703 km)
1965 600 miles (970 km)
1966 750 miles (1,210 km)
1967 300 miles (480 km)
1968 400 miles (640 km)
1969 250 miles (400 km)
1970 275 miles (443 km)
Tory Government:
1971 23 miles (37 km)
1972 50 miles (80 km)
1973 35 miles (56 km)
Tories lifted 432 miles of track
Labour lifted 3,633 miles of track
Now you tell me who was to blame?
We can argue if Beeching's reports achieved what was hoped for. Quite possibly only achieving £30 Bn in savings when the hole was £100 Bn equates to a failure but it then begs the question how much more SHOULD have been closed?
@@1chish zzzzzzzzz
He didn't close a single railway, he wrote a report. railways were closed by politicians and as LABOUR was elected less than a year after the report was published why didn't they cancel it? LABOUR closed most of the railways not Richard Beeching.
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Beeching is an interesting one, and I must admit I personally lay the blame at Marples more than him - for all intents and purposes, Beeching was a civil servant performing a task, whilst the origin of the policy lay with the minister. The policy itself was based upon a flawed premise (that the railways could realistically be profitable), the zeitgeist towards modernity ("trains are old, cars are the future" in this instance, but this also affected 60s policy making in a lot of areas, such as the "streets in the skies") combined with the immaturity of city planning as a discipline ("we can solve traffic with more roads!"). The fact that Marples was demonstrably corrupt also adds to my tendency to blame him over Beeching - alongside the Hammersmith flyover controversy, Marples hired prostitutes, and eventually fled to Monte Carlo so he wouldn't get done for some moderate-to-heavy tax dodgery. It is also worth noting that lines were closed that Beeching did not recommend closing, and that the Minister (and in some cases, parliament) had the final say over line closures, not Beeching.
That's not to say Beeching is entirely innocent - he was deliberately brought in as an outsider from ICI (a chemical company) and was thus ignorant of many facets of the railways. As such, his data gathering was very flawed, often using single day snapshots which may have not been indicative of long term line usage, amongst other flaws. However, it is worth noting that Marples was the one who brought him in...
Excellent survey. In Italy we had a similar problem and it all revolves over an attitude against railway transport (in the fifties and sixties we axed most of long distance tramway lines and small independent branch lines, and in the seventies/eighties it was the turn of branch lines from the national railways in the so called "dry branch cuts"). The problem is, that a railway network is interconnected, and in many cases that "lightly used" branch is the gateway for its communities to access the grater network. Plus road transport may be not near efficient as rail. So investment on the whole system would probably allow greater benefits than cutting branches all along. Switzerland, Austria, Germany and even France are there to remind us.
I can't help but find it funny that, in a lot of things like Thomas fan stories, he's portrayed as a cruel uncaring man but when you actually look at the real guy he looks like a kind grandpa
That's because "Thomas stories" are fictitious.
that's because beeching closed nothing
@@steveluckhurst2350 Actually you're wrong. A lot of the original Thomas stories are based on real life events and incorporate real life things that had happened and that were going on with the Railways at the time of writing. The Rev Awdry was a Railway enthusiast who was writing children's stories based on the actual UK railways, thats why he had such issues with the Thomas The Tank Engine TV series when they started including unrealistic and fictitious elements to the stories he had written around the 3rd Series in the 90's
@@acidmack1041 Thanks for your input. I suggest you learn what "ficticious" means.
The fact that at the same time Japan was having the same issue but instead they just invested in the railways, you know the economically literate thing to do. Makes it more infuriating that we put a corrupt physist in charge of the railways economic future.
I blame Marples more. Apparently Beeching took some action to help the Bluebell Railway at one point. Doesn't make up for what he did but when you think about it this man was appointed by a man with biasm towards road travel.
Economically literate: Investing in public services
@@ChimpManZ1264 Marples had personal business interest in closing railways. Simple as.
@@toyotaprius79 Didn't say anything different, nothing to correct me on.
JNR did have their "Beeching axe" Moment around 1972
I go to Britain twice a year and am very impressed with the rail service, from major cities to small towns. Here in Canada, like in the USA there's almost no rail service to speak of. Major cities like Calgary, Alberta or Columbus, Ohio have no passenger rail service at all.
WOW I Wasn't expecting that comment . Thanks . I do find it an incredible claim because I thought Brit. Railways were , well , shit .
@@riklangham6739 You don't know how good you have it. I am very impressed with the serivce in the U.K.
@rik langham - compared to the United States, British rail service is not shit. Like Mr Lewis, I also travel to the UK several times a year & happily use UK rail services almost exclusively to get where I need to go.
the only time i’ve ever heard someone say “thanks to dr beechimg,” was on james may’s toy stories. where he was looking for a suitable location for his world record longest model train layout.
He didn't close a single railway, he wrote a report. railways were closed by politicians and as LABOUR was elected less than a year after the report was published why didn't they cancel it? LABOUR closed most of the railways not Richard Beeching.
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Dr Beeching is treated similarly to Edward Thompson in a way. They’re both infamously criticised for things that were out of their control. In Thompson’s case, he designed locomotives that are crapped on by people and with Beeching, he was told by the government to shut down railway lines.
Well Gresley's engines were simply better looking and better engineered.
He didn't close a single railway, he wrote a report. railways were closed by politicians and as LABOUR was elected less than a year after the report was published why didn't they cancel it? LABOUR closed most of the railways not Richard Beeching.
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Apparently it seems like LABOUR is the one to blame, not Beeching.
yes, the labour party closed them
@@simonjames3845 at last! the truth
The little branch lines fed into the larger lines - you wanted to go from "Little Puddleton Marsh" in Somerset to some equally tiny Scottish place? You'd get the train to the main line station and then go from there - chopping them out destroyed the whole network - as soon as you had to drive to get to a train, you may as well drive to your destination.
Exactly. It was assumed that people would get the bus or drive to the nearest main line station instead of taking a local train to it. But once people have bought a car, and once they are in the driving seat, natural inertia will take them all the way in it.
Oh give over. Rising car ownership was going to do that anyway and that was what this was all about.
@@harrynewiss4630 - Not really. Where I used to live there was a local station that I could walk to. It would take me down to the town's main station and, from there, I could get anywhere on the network.
Once the local station had gone it meant that I'd need to drive to the main station and pay for a day's parking (NOT a cheap option - and that's if there were spaces to be had). So, unless I was going into London, I'd just drive to my destination.
@@vikingraider1961 I know how it worked thanks. But it was inefficient and expensive
@@harrynewiss4630 - So, as an example, going to visit my mate in Stoke (from Maidstone, Kent) I drove - rather have got the train, but three days parking would have doubled the cost (at the time). Thus we see the main lines start to lose money as passenger numbers drop off. You see you're making the same mistake as Beeching did - you're looking at each line to see if that line made or lost money - when, actually, you need to see what the passenger numbers are that feed into the whole network - it has to be looked at as a whole - not line by line. Obviously, if a line is losing money and doesn't feed into the network, then it's a whole different story.
My local town lost its station in 1967 and is now widely believed to be one of the largest places in England without a railway connection. With only one main road connecting us to Cambridge and an overstretched bus service which is heavily relied upon by commuters, the effects of the Beeching Axe are still being felt almost 60 years later. Funnily enough, the closure of the railway also coincided with the London overspill, which saw the town's population pretty much double over a period of 10 years.
Damn it's almost like a railway should serve its communities not make a profit, especially a nationalized one
Only countires with very long distance railways; those in the US and Russia can hope to make a profit. Every other country has to subsidise it's rail system. Currently, the UK is subsidising the so called privatised rail companies far in excess of what it was having to with BR.
@@simongee8928 Freight also makes more money than passenger services.
What I find most interesting; and this is especially relevant in today's world for both the UK, Australia, and many other countries that were mass populated with railways.
Prior to the 40's, there were operational railway lines everywhere, and the railways helped out a lot of communities. The roads then started coming about and the railways soon became something in the background as roads took over. But now; in the current day. The roads are overcrowded, and the demand for rail transportation is higher than ever. Because the roads mostly don't have a whole lot of space to build new roads in areas of mass population; whilst rail corridors (operational or not), still exist. Governments are taking full advantage of previous infrastructure and working towards rebuilding the railways to help ease the mass clogging of traffic that comes from the roads.
Unfortunately at the time, the Governments look at what money can be made then and there; and not what sort of money can be made in the distant future. If half of the railways that were abandoned; were continued into the current day; things would be a lot different. Especially given to the extent, of where some railways closed; only a few years before areas and towns that the railways once served, began to boom in population, and would have proved vital to keeping a community moving, as car traffic became an issue.
I live in Australia; and such routes as the Mornington Branch; Queenscliff branch, and Heathsville branch, in Victoria Australia; all closed due to the government not seeing enough profit being made from said lines, and deciding to close them, then and there. Heck; when the Mornington line was on its last day in 1981; the entire town blocked the train from leaving Mornington, in protest, because they knew the town was about to boom. And they were right. The line closed, and shortly after, the Mornington Peninsula boomed as a tourism hotspot. Worse still, is that for such a large area, there isn't rail transport anymore down that direction what so ever, (except for the Stony Point line that runs via the back end of the Peninsula but doesn't hit the bigger towns). And every single weekend, the roads are bumper to bumper with holiday makers, where as all these roads wouldn't be as crowded if they had of just kept the lines open...
I think one Example of a railway route that suffered the most due to Beeching's Axe would be the ever loved Somerset and Dorset line
It's impossible to label one route as the one that suffered most, since over half of the country's entire network was destroyed. The urban landscapes of countless towns and cities have been perminently ruined by cars clogging up every single street. Had rail been invested in during the 60's rather than axed, as they did in Japan in response to their deteriorating network, today's Britain would probably be an unrecognisably better place to live. The utter dysfunction of today's society is what you get from corporate greed and a government who are entirely on the side of the billionaires.
@@idot3331 I know, I'm just saying that's one example that comes to mind for me, whenever Beeching is mentioned.
The Somerset and Dorset surely could have been saved. By the early seventies, the most profitable coach service in Britain not serving London was Bristol to Bournemouth.
They did not assess the use of lines and stations during the holiday season.
@@digitallifeline162 Nope. That was one of the aspects where the report was criticized the hardest.
Britain needs a rail revival.
Tell that to all those striking employees.
Too late. Too many formations have been demolished/sold off and there isn't room to rebuild. The integrity of way should have been preserved . . .
@@SuperMikado282, The employees are trying to stop the closure of ticket offices but the greedy fat cat bosses care only about making as much money as possible
@@silondon9010 Why not come into the 21st century and do it online.
I booked and paid for a two month rail-tour on Chinese National Railways on my smartphone from my home 10,000 kms away.
Everything went like clockwork.
@@silondon9010 So are the employees, who are the highest paid in Europe.
Who cares about people trying to get on with their lives?
I know Beeching was heavily hated for closing hundreds of lines, stations and a number of engines and rolling stock were scrapped, but considering he was chairman and seemed to have the final say you do have to ask: Did he really enjoy it? I mean, being the man in charge he was making these difficult and unpopular decisions and knew a lot of staff were gonna go unemployed. But however you view him, Dr Beeching will always be looked upon as the Axe Man.
He was corrupt and getting back handers he loved doing it. It's also pretty obvious he didn't care and wasn't very aware of what he was doing. For example Wales doesn't even have a North to south railway anymore because of him. You have to enter England to do it which adds 2 hours onto the journey. The level of incompetence to that shows he really didn't care. We have to keep in mind he was economically iliterate, so he had no clue what he was doing, if he knew economics he's have known what he was doing was wrong and would have invested in the railways like Japan did at the same time and well we know who has the better railways.
He was appointed by Marples, the transport minister who had a family business in paving roads
Beeching didn’t have the final say. He proposed that the North London Line should close, but it remained open while Blackpool Central which he proposed to retain was closed.
He asked for salary that outstripped that of the Prime Minister who employed him...
He didn't close a single railway, he wrote a report. railways were closed by politicians and as LABOUR was elected less than a year after the report was published why didn't they cancel it? LABOUR closed most of the railways not Richard Beeching.
When the Bluebell Railway opened it's doors they asked Dr Beeching to be guest of honour.
The reason the line to East Grinstead was saved because Dr Beeching lived in East Grinstead.
It is said he remarked " if l hadn't closed it you wouldn't have the chance to reopen it".
Insightful and balanced view. As a child I grew up with the stories and in some cases the extant infrastructure of some of those axed lines. Some of them had only been closed to freight traffic a couple of years before I was born. I spent many hours as a young child walking along the alignments of recently lifted p-way. Even then I could comprehend how devastating the loss of the railway must have been. Fast forward to today and I'm positive my own city's problems with traffic and congestion would not be as severe, if we only had those three axed lines running into it, because those were the lines that had the urban stations. A quicker, less stressful commute to be sure. But... Less trains, more cars, more roads, more jobs, more tax, more finance, more profit. Profit win. People lose.
I'm an American and even I've heard of and reviled Dr. Beeching.
I myself make videos about trains and infrastructure in the Netherlands. and here also many lines were scrapped during that time. which is a pity because there is less track to film haha. but if a bus can provide the same service for less cost it is probably the right thing to do. Still, I'm always afraid that when you break the smallest lines. fewer travelers will use the network and new small lines will then be created that will then be closed again, and so on and so forth
As noted in the video... the busses rarely actually provided anything like 'the same service' and were often axed in turn, so that's not much of an argument.
Honestly, I'd say replacing any rail route that isn't "last mile" (by a much stricter definition than often used today), or possibly "first mile" depending on how you look at it, freight transport with road vehicles was probably a mistake in the long term. And even that exception is debatable.
You're right about the knock-on effect issue. A lot of people seem to miss that rail (and public transport in general) services aren't a collection of individual lines, but a Network. It often makes perfect sense to have 'unprofitable' lines, Especially if the whole arangment is owned and run by a government. Those 'unprofitable' lines are often feeders to larger, far more profitable lines, that would see a loss of income exceeding the reduction in costs achieved if the 'unprofitable' feeder lines were shut down... and for a government, the purposes of rail fairs isn't to turn a profit Anyway, it's to offset day to day running costs. The profit comes from the increased tax take from increased economic activity caused by the increased freedom of mobility that effective (frequent, cheap, not excessively awful in any other reguard) public transport provides. For passenger rail anyway. Freight is slightly different, but similar factors still apply.
Buses seemed to be the answer then, but they are not as we see from our congested road network today. It's no better in the Netherlands than in other countries. The big advantage of rail transport is that it takes place off the road, it is completely independent and it also has a much higher capacity. However, this presupposes that you also take care of your network.
Buses are cheaper but are not remotely as efficient as trains. Even if they buses at the time turned out to be faster and cheaper to operate, they caused significant congestion on roads. The same problem can be seen with trucks. Finally, it's more environmentally beneficial when you compare overall emissions..
The problem with the Beeching Cuts was the Government was solely looking at money and profitable and not societal benefit and development. It's even worse, because British Railways was Government owned so profitability should never have been a factor for any decision making. Since the 90's they've been finding out the hard way as congestion is far worse and urban expansion has crippled road networks and they no longer have trackbeds or anything left to restore old railway lines and have to start with entirely new alignments - costing even more money than it would otherwise had done so anyway.
maybe we could agree with you about the buses if we had better walking and biking infrastructure. We are far more similar countries culturally than we are differrent and East Anglia mirrors the low lying Nederlands terrain across the sea. If your country has managed to build good infrastructure since the 1970s and fight back against automobiles, maybe we can too.
The interesting thing I find is that, a lot of us that didn't live through this era put much of the blame or most of the cause of Marples. But for the people who lived through that era, I think they will always hold a bitter grimace for Beeching. One man said "A 5-year-old could have done what Beeching did."
A perfect example of panicking leading to long term dilemmas.
To me, the main issues with Beeching Axe was these 2 things
British Rail was a government owned business, so why did it need to profit, it does not make sense to expect a public service to profit
Why were the alignments not kept? Would have made sense to have kept the alignments of these old railways intact, potentially as a Cycle path (or even normal road), so that if the line was needed again, whether for a Tram, or re opening, it could have been done easily and much cheaper.
Make profits for future investment like any other business concern.
@@SuperMikado282 How soon fools forget the east coast mainline was electrified and later the west coast mainline was electrified... Improvements were made to the mainlines. Even today a half century later Beeching's improvements are being improved again with HS2...
@@ronclark9724Exactly.
Ernest Marples sounds quite a bit like Charles Erwin Wilson here in the US. Wilson was the head of General Motors who became the Secretary of Defense under Dwight D. Eisenhower where he pushed for the National Highway Act. Eisenhower heartily supported it due to how much the German Autobahn impressed him. Wilson later went back to GM as a board member. The Act plus suburbanization led to heavy car dependence (and many countries like Canada did the same to emulate the US.)
Cutting service to save money means losing revenue in the long run, with the losses compounding with the increasing of cuts. Investing in rail like Japan did yields better results in the long term, despite the great short-term pain. The birthplace of railways should be a world leader in rail transport and not repeat our mistakes from here in the States (of course, I want decent passenger rail in the US too, as country size doesn't mean that we are obligated to spread things further apart.)
So, as an American growing up in a part of the country where trains aren't as prevalent, I have a bit of an outside looking in perspective, as while I find what happened careless for the millions of lives that it affected in a negative way, I don't have the kind of context to how a contemporary British person or someone going through this at the time would've felt.
That being said, it's sad that I've seen this kind of pattern far too well when it comes to all different aspects of life. You'll find cuts and cancellations in all walks of life, from jobs and transports to our own entertainment. Sometimes it's like how Beecher saw it, something using solely facts and logic and not realizing (or caring about) the pain that is inflicted on the people affected, and other times it's like Marples, who selfishly snuffs it out just to push their own selfish agenda.
It frustrates me that this is the way the world is run, with lack of care for our fellow man, and where the rich people in charge can just ruin someone's livelihood or joy just because they can. This kind of shit just makes me sick, and makes me wish that everyone could do better.
Trains are everywhere in the US. The US has the most efficient freight network worldwide.
@@cactusman1771 Yes, but the train culture isn't as prevalent, that was what I was getting at.
I wasn't aware of this because I only fan in The States. This was very informative for such a short video on the subject. I have to assume there were others at work behind the scenes. The "I'll always be looked upon as the axe man" kind of gives that idea. It almost seems obvious that Marples was heavily involved. This is all sadly fascinating.
Beeching did little good for British passenger service, but it’s interesting to see that his ideas for rail freight have become the industry standard across the world at this point. Shows a lot about the different operating mindsets that make a successful freight railroad versus a successful passenger railroad.
Its interesting to look at two optimized rail networks both world leaders. Japan for its passenger network and the USA for its freight network. Both barely use the other form of train traffic. Though the US is lambasted for "not having good trains" even though it has the best freight train network in the world.
I have an interesting take. While so many communities and individuals were horribly affected by Beeching. He has unknowingly been the keystone for British railway preservation.
We would have nowhere near the size and scale of the preservation scene that we do today. The fact that the UK has over 100+ heritage railways with thousands of saved steam and diesel locomotives showcasing the history and splendour that the railways once had.
Beeching was not the best man by any means, but he can almost certainly be regarded as a forunner of railway preservation.
Yes but if he didn't close all the lines to begin with there wouldn't be much to preserve as they'd still be open
I find it quite ironic now considering places such as Leeds and Liverpool are now suffering capacity issues as all their services run into a single central station rather than the multiple of stations they used to have. In hindsight it would have been beneficial to keep these other stations open to allow traffic to flow easier such as Leeds Central which was pretty much next door to the current Leeds station.
As an added point, the railways were also constrained by an age old transportation law in regards to carrying goods where they had to carry anything and made losses while road companies could refuse unprofitable contracts. They were actually in process of getting rid of this law in the 30s but WW2 stopped this and they never picked up afterwards, so freight continued to be unprofitable.
Beeching was understandably hated, but doesn't deserve to be hated half as much as the real culprit in this mess - Ernest Marples.
If you mention beeching around my Grandad he flies into a mad rage because he just couldn’t commute thanks to Beeching shutting the branchline, if he ever got his hands on the man he’d probably strangle him to death
The mistake lies in the basic assumption that a railway must necessarily be profitable. But there is so much more at stake. Sensible local passenger transport is a service of general interest. It is a core task of the state, just like electricity, water and education. It is an investment so that the economy can be successful. And it would secure a lot of jobs.
The railway has always been a great leveller. With good rail connections also to rural areas, we would almost certainly have much less car traffic today. The new satellite towns are being built around a railway station.
A similar thing happened in New South Wales in the 1970s. Due to poor track condition, a country train from Dubbo to Coonabarabran could only run at 60 km/h and took ages to travel. The bus that replaced the train ran at 110 km/h. Ironically, now all the major capitals have standard gauge track across Australia, very few take the train. Flying or even driving is faster.
I heard somewhere that Dr. Beeching saved Fenchurch on the Bluebel Railway. Apparently BR was giving the Bluebell an ultimatum while they were trying to get the money together to buy Fenchurch. BR apparently only gave the Bluebell 4 weeks to buy the engine, but Dr. Beeching intervened and had them hold Fenchurch for 6 months.
If I ever find myself needing an idea for a weapon in a game or something, I’ll make “Beeching axe: statistically proven to cut through branches, rails, and costs!”
...and then in very small writing: "cutting costs is not guaranteed; EA Games accepts no responsibility for Axe failures"
Lol
Haha....
It's still interesting to wonder how my valley would've looked with its railway, now I just walk along the cycle track and can see the old viaducts, platforms and even tracks in the bushes.
I really like some of the explanations from the (german?) Wikipedia why the Beeching Act didn't work as thought:
- The small savings resulted primarily from the fact that the closed small railway lines served as feeders for the large ones. Without these feeders, the number of passengers on the existing railway lines also fell. Beeching's assumption that passengers would only use their car to the nearest major train station in order to continue their journey from there by train proved to be wrong.
- Another reason the plan failed was that many of the small railroads ran very small deficits. The important and heavily frequented commuter routes generated much larger losses; but even Beeching recognized that closing these lines would not be politically feasible.
- The failure of the Beeching plans is also attributed to the fact that they focused unilaterally on route closures and largely ignored other savings opportunities. For example, the potential use of cost-saving railcars and railbuses was rejected by Beeching with the argument that the route costs alone were decisive, and he also almost completely ignored the costs for administration and staff.
Beeching was merely a puppet in the Beeching Act the real mastermind was Ernest Marples
And do you know what his family business was?
@@toyotaprius79 he was the Post Naster General of the UK and the Beeching Axe was orchestrated by him basically Beeching axed the railways so Marples' posties could take over both Beeching and Marples were low life crooks
I enjoyed that 'Oh Dr. Beeching' show as a child. An age before recordable shows, so it was either watch it live or.. take the rarity of it appearing six days later in the early hours of the morning.
And as far as I am aware, that show never got repeated / replayed on BBC.
And once, I knew the show was to come on but, I was a mile away from home with a hill in the middle. So I remember running home as quickly as I could to watch that weeks episode.
I do not remember the plots but .. its a show with a steam engine!! *happy child me*.
In an age before recordable shows?? ODB was first broadcast in 1996, video recorders were everywhere by the mid 1980s. We were a working class family (my dad being a carpenter and my mum a cleaner) and we had our first video in 1984, hell, I even had my own at 15 in 1986.
@@joewalker2152 I mean like with what we have now, how you can program your program provider to pre-record the show.
Yes, there was VCRs as you mention. And I feel or agree, they could have recorded or programmed. I did not have a mobile (I could have used my friend house line but at that age, such things do not occur). Or I would have had to leave a note set up for a parent to push record.
So it was still relying on someone else to push the record, but I will mention again, I was a child back then, and lacked the knowledge.
It was only a few years later [1998] do I have evidence that I would personally start to record stuff, like Robot Wars.
Maybe I should have been a little clearer on the matter. As we both have lived through the same period, even if at different ages or periods of our lives.
I always did wonder how Dr Beeching felt after his reports were executed, feeling he'd done what was best for Britain to keep the railways alive and yet as a result becoming one of the most hated men in the country. I can't help but imagine he led a pretty miserable life afterwards.
I think Beeching regretted nothing.
I find very funny that 364 days ago, Victor Tanzig uploaded his "Beeching" episode of Stories of Sodor. I quite like the touch of you singing the theme to Oh, Dr. Beeching at the end of the video
Great work ToT, I like your narration.
nice video. Considerng the nature of Bulgy the double decker bus in Thomas the Tank engine i wonder if he was a dig at Beeching as well
Grandchild: Grandpa, who is Dr. Beeching?
Grandpa: Well-
Victor Tanzig: But that's a story for another day.
Excellent! And the tuneful rendition of "Oh, Dr. Beeching!" was an unexpected little bonus 😅
Great Video and it goes on unfortunately Derby City council have plans to demolish the Friargate Station and famous Arches now
Don't forget Ernest Marples, he appointed Beeching when he was Minister for Transport , and his family's business of building motorways.
I'm continually puzzled by the insistence that railways _must_ be profitable (or at least self-sustaining) while roads _must_ be free to use and then people rip up the marginally-profitable rail in favour of guaranteed-loss roads and call it 'financial sense'.
A lot of people miss that 'unprofitable' railways are often Very profitable... the extra income just shows up in the tax take or the 'profitable' line they feed into, rather than their ticket sales.
What a wonderful picture of Yeovil Town Station. So many happy days spent their.
I’ve never been so early to a new video, but great as always
8:31 lobotomy was considered a surgery as well
Japan at the same time had similar issues and it did what any sane nation would do and invested in the railways. As we can see now one country was not just right it runs rings around the other.
Well, I am not sure if Japan did the right thing. They loaded themselves with massive debts to construct Shinkansen (roughly 350 billion, equivalent to the GDP of Denmark, which makes HS2 look like small beer), which has still not been payed off. Right now, the debt to GDP ratio of Japan is such that in a decade or two from now, all their government revenues will be spend on interest payments, meaning that the country is essentially bankrupt.
Setting aside the pros & cons of Beeching's infamous "axe" & Marple's dodgy double-dealings, one winner is the Heritage Railway complex. Steam was been scrapped wholesale & beyond BR's list of 100? locos designated as suitable for preserving as museum pieces, enthusiastic amateurs were buying up locos to restore (thank you again Mr Dai Woodham!), but where could they run them? The answer was some of the branch lines which had been closed, now reopened & run both for the local population & that much-needed tourism boost.
The same thing happened in the United States in the 1970s with deregulation where thousands of miles of railroad were abandoned
@Eric Crockett - I remember that & lately there has been talk abt restoring some of the mid-Atlantic lines into NYC & Philly especially along routes where the tracks still exist.
If that was “surgery” then I hate to consider what “amputation” would be.
We didn’t really have a Dr. B in the states, just an incremental decline of rail service, with many factors tossed in that led to accelerated decline.
9:45 this sounded so much like a Thomas song 😂
Really good insight. Thanks.
I know several old railway bridges in Lancashire are still standing from the Blackburn to Chorley line. They demolished the longest viaduct that ran over the Botany Bay Area but there are still several on walking routes and there’s one in Blackburn itself still standing. The line ran past my parents house
Interesting U.K. railway history I didn't know as an American. Of course, we have had our own mass losses of railway lines and services over here in the name of "free enterprise" and "cost-cutting," oblivious to the larger national interests served by better passenger rail service to isolated towns and communities. There is a U.S. misconception that things are handled better in Europe. Thanks for posting this one!
America or Europe, the bribes of the automotive and oil industries spend all the same.
Ah, the sweet taste of "democracy"...
How exactly was hitting American railway companies with massive corporate taxes, crippling red tape, and overtly pro-union anti-employer policies, while using tax money to build highways and airports, done "in the name of" free enterprise?
@@paulharland7280 It was done in the name of the free enterprise _of the automotive and oil monopolies._ Did you not read what I said?
"Free enterprise" is just a code word for the freedom of the rich having the freedom to dominate the poor.
It's called public infrastructure.
@@caramelldansen2204 Someone is aware of capitalist realism.
I think the correct answer is why everyone in Britain (who doesn't own or have shares in a car manufacturer or making roads) hate this man
I don’t have shares in anything, haven’t had a car since 1982, but I certainly don’t hate Dr. Beeching.
@@srfurley well you don't know what he did then.
my local railway was part of those cuts. they tried preserving it, but failed. its now a marina/dock/cafe/walking path
You can’t argue with the economics. 50% of the network contributed 1% of revenues. Also, it was pre computerisation, automation and www. This mean the smallest revenue stations had to be overmanned 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. Nowadays many could have been saved with online ticketing automatic ticket barriers etc. I was a railwayman but some of it had to go.
IT WAS MARPLE
Well tbh screw Dr Bitching, Dude was one of the MAIN reasons steam ended. I. Do. Not. Give. A. Crap If steam was outdated at the time, Such elegant machines, I will forever love steam locos of any country!
Not so. It was pretty obvious that by the time of the 1955 modernisation plan that steam was going to be phased out.
Great video. Thought you covered the history of the railway closures up to Beeching well and succinctly without going through the well worn cliches about Marples. You know your onions!
Interesting video as always :) between the video content and the comments below about the transport Minister in charge at the time, Marples I think it was, I may have an idea to add to the worldbuilding of an absurdist fantasy story / setting I've been tinkering with, so thank you
You wanna hear something eye brow raising? apparently, in 1962, he opened Holywell Halt on the Bluebell Railway...and apparently gave the railway preservation movement, and the Bluebell in particular, his blessing.
Beeching was simply the hit-man hired by Marples. But let's not forget that it was a Labour government from 1964 to 1970 which oversaw the implementation of Dr Beeching's recommendations.
Great vid. Nice to see iliketrains getting a mention for their great song The Beeching Report.
Without Beeching, there would today not be as many preserved lines, or indeed engines left today!
In the Early eighteen hundreds, Railway mania saw many lines constructed willy nilly on pen and paper, without much thoughtful planning !! There were 5 rail ways of getting from Rugby to Leicester at one time!
I'm a railway enthusiast and also worked on the railways for 20 years .some of beaching rail closures was needed but some where absolutely ridiculous great central railway would have been a great frieght route also Buxton to matlock
One thing overlooked in this video - public transport will NEVER be a profitable business on its own. And that´s what people in Beechings era still didn´t know. Beeching cut and similar actions throughout Europe (both on west and east side of Europe) reached a similar point in their studies in the end: you cannot make profitable branch lines, but you need them to feed the main line; though everything except main lines will hardly ever be profitable.
If you take a train to work, it might be full and really profitable, but the opposite direction wouldn´t be full as much. And you also need to run in other then peak times, otherwise you lose a significant portion of customers due to uncertainity and unreliability of your service throughout the day. Thanks to this, well designed and effective system will still be able to sell only 20-30% it´s total seat capacity. You either
- subsidize the system, so it transport as much people as it can, or
- cut the system and leave only main lines (that will still stay somewhat profitable).
The biggest issue afterwards is that all the people in your country NEED some way to get things and make living. You then resort to motoring traffic and run into many other problems like not many car parks, not enough lanes on roads and all in all end like USA, where car infrastructure cannot pay for itself even through all those taxes and such, because walkability and public transport are both considered "rude words".
You need to find a balance or sort.
I agree that you need to have the whole network to make public transport work, but I disagree that this will never be profitable. If you balance the system-wide cost and benefits properly, I don't see why it shouldn't work out. The railway has a big capacity and energy efficiency advantage over other modes of transport, and the high-frequency high-capacity services will make huge profits because of that. This gives you plenty of leeway to organize the whole network in the way that is best for the business as a whole. Not every small line needs to make a profit on its own. As long as it makes people choose to go by train, it grows the business.
@@eljanrimsa5843 Public transit IS more cost efficient than cars, but it has few "flaws" by its very design:
1) You cannot utilise its full capacity of vehicles. In working system, even when full capacity of vehicles is used in one part of the line, the average of that line is usually around 50-60%. And then you have the opposite direction, where with trains and suburban buses people logically go TO the city but not so many OUT of the city. Then you are reaching total usage of 25-30% of capacity of the line vehicles. You might be more cost effective, but definitely not this much.
2) Reliable transport system also needs to run between peak hours and during evenings and into the night. You need less busses/trains etc. during those periods, but you need them. Any private company wouldn´t buy buses to cover only few hours of the day and noone will be willing to run on "low hours". You can still make some line profitable by "cherry picking" the best (usually main lines), but the whole network won´t make enough money.
3) If you count in all expenses, you would come out with enormous price ticket per km, resulting in low usage and forcing people out of PT. You do not want to do that, you need its price available for everyone and reliability so they will use it - mothers with strollers same as managers. You are doing it so you do not need to demolish blocks of flats for parkings like in US cities, because maintaining huge wide roads also costs money, but those are hard to redirect to car owners; yet still someone has to pay for it. For any city/country it is wise to invest in good public transport, tram tracks, metro lines and in overall reliability even if it don´t pay for itself (in my home town Prague, the ticket price is on a level of around 30-40% costs of the service running, rest is paid by the city), because it still costs LESS in pollution, parking space, road maintenance and it actually makes your city more liveable when people can walk and use public transport to get aroung their whole day including getting kids to schools, themselves to work, doing afternoon shopping or getting to theatre/club in the evening and STILL HAVING an option to get home by it in the night
@@eljanrimsa5843 For comparison of what happens when free market capitalism rules the city public transport, I strongly recommend a video from "Railways of the World" called "Post-Soviet Transit: How Free Market Competition Can Ruin A City". He mapped a great example of what exactly happens when you go for such model and what will the result of "cherrypicking" of lines produce.
@@siriusczech I would suggest add extra capacity towards the city in the morning, split up the extra trains and use them to move people inside the city network during the day. You can also improve things by re-designing. In Zürich all S-Bahn lines start at an outer suburb, go through the central hub and end at an outer suburb on the other side. That way you become flexible to add capacity in the inner sections without having to move empty double-sized trains all the way to the ends of the line. And you can service the outer suburbs at a high frequency, too, if you add capacity where you need it. A S-Bahn going every 15 minutes is what makes many people choose to commute by rail instead of car. And every 10 minutes would be even better. That way you grow your customer base. Of course you cannot chop the network into different lines and just calculate the profit for that one line. That would be stupid. You have to measure the effect on the whole system.
I agree that public transport fulfills different roles, and I would want to leave this out of the profitability calculations. Provide basic connectivity to all regions, provide a safe public transport option at night, and pay for this as a public service. I guess most people would agree that is a good use of the taxes they pay. They do here in Switzerland.
@@eljanrimsa5843 It still doesn´t solve it all. I am from Prague and we have an excellent public transport. We have S trains going through, though splitting them in the middle is a no-go, we have no use for only-intracity trains. We have 3 lines of metro and tons of trams and buses.
Still due to needs of peak time operations combined with down times service reliability you cannot make a profit.
I agree that it is a good use of taxpayers money, absolutely. But it won´t make a profit without donations/subsidy and that what this all started about - and what was a Beeching´s cut problem. You cannot make a public transit network profitable. You can (and should) do it with cargo, but definitely not doable with people.
"Sodor was not spared from the axe. Thomas, Percy, and Toby were put in storage after the Ffarquhar branch was closed. They later came out and went their separate ways. Thomas would take Annie, Clarabel and Henrietta and leave sodor and head to the bluebell railway, where they now live, Percy formed a rebellion against British Rail with many other engines that were withdrawn throughout the country, which got Percy assassinated 3 months later, a statue was constructed in his honor. Toby fell off the face of the earth and was missing until a week ago. When flying Scotsman visited sodor in '67, Gordon begged Flying Scotsman to come with him when he was to leave, and left sodor with his brother. Henry was left to die in his forest after a crash, but was rescued decades later by The Sodor Steam Locomotive Trust. Edward was used as a test for steam diesel conversion, the results were disastrous. James was withdrawn in 1962 and the fat controller saved him from scrap. Duck, Oliver, toad, old slow coach, and the auto coaches were saved by the ditcot railway center. Donald and Douglas were saved by a railway in Scotland."
Most of the Isle of Wight system had already gone by the time of the Beeching Report, Merstone to Ventnor closed 1952, Freshwater to Newport and Brading to Bembridge 1953 and Sandown to Newport 1956, all that was left by 1963 was Ryde to Cowes and Ryde to Ventnor
Beeching stated that the 1955 plan had failed, but it did initialize the modernisation of the signalling, which, over time, reduced costs astronomically.
Okay folks let's be practical. It's ridiculous to blame Dr Beeching for the end of steam. This was called for by the British railways modernisation plan of 1955 - years before Beeching had any association with railways. It was an act of lunacy by the British transport commission who only a few years before had commissioned a fleet of new modern steam engines to cover the next 30 years until electrification was widespread. As a result some of these excellent engines served as little as five years.
I think he did show a lack of foresight in some cases as to what could be done to develop lines particularly in tourist areas. However some rural branches never had a hope of being anything but money pits. Also he did not foresee that the car would become a victim of its own success and ultimately some of us would be driven back to the railways to avoid sitting in long queues of traffic.
Hard to imagine Britain once had the single most comprehensive railway network in the world. Seems that it would have been sensible to have kept some of the essential rights-of-way.
Thanks to this dude every time I'm in Glastonbury I have to take a hour's bus ride (sometimes longer) to get to the nearest stations in Bath or Bristol. Even Wells, fucking Wells, doesn't have a station.
Dr Beeching lived in East Grinstead, W Sussex. He cut the East-West services running through the town (Crawley-EG-Tunbridge Wells), and the line south to the coast via Lewes. But left the north-going line into London, with EG now the terminus - some rumoured because that was the line he used to commute to work. One section of track on the E-W line in the town was turned into a part of the A22 to bypass the town centre and was called “the Beeching Cut” 😂
and so Denying a route to Gatwick via Three Bridges utter madness
Beeching left office in May 1965, and he lived south-east of the town, in an area called Brookhurst. His house was called Little Manor IIRC and was down a private road off of Lewes Road. The 3 Bridges to E Grinstead to T Well West line although mentioned in the Railways report of 1963, was closed in 1966. Part of the line was running in profit the other did not, hence why it was closed in its entirety. It was closed by Castle, who was Minister at the time.
I was an engine cleaner at Hull Dairycoates in the early 1960s, when Beeching devastated Hull's railway, they gave me a one way ticket to Leeds as a fireman in 1966. I had to live in a doss house as I was homeless. Thanks Dr B.
In the US,there was- pre-Conrail,a USRA REPORT,which could and did destroy a good part of the North East railways,and there is,now,many lines being relaid! One good example,the former Erie main,through the Southern Tier,in New York state. When the double stack trains were coming online,the Erie main was found to be ideal,as it had NO RESTRICTIONS ON WIDTH,AND HEIGHT,i.e.HIGH AND WIDES! The line had to be relaid and upgraded,and the New York government breathed a sigh of relief! Also Nelson Rockefeller,then governor,had the Empire Service put in,because of the dreaded 4 letter word-SNOW-of which upstate New York is notorious for,as the highways would be totally shut down! The winters of 1977-78 were extremely heavy in that regard,and later in the 2000's,the New York City area got a dose of upstate weather,and found the only things running were the railroads and subways,a bitter lesson there! People and politicians seem never to learn,that there are reasons why things are done,and arbitrary and capricious actions have deleterious long term effects! Thank you 😇 😊!
One thing to remember up and till 2013 Britain was still paying off its war debt. Britain did not come out of austerity until the mid 1960s. It could be argued that was not really about cost saving at all, if so why scrap a seven year old engine costing £33,500, the 9F? Britannia Locomotives were doing a sterling job on the East Coast Mainline only to be replaced by Deltics and the N.E./ EASTERN regional board would not touch any other diesel as they were consider underpowered for the route. Also it is recorded that one 9F on a passenger run hit 90mph.
As the Labour Government kicked all steam off the railway network in 68, commentators blasted that decision during the '73 fuel crisis, and steam would have not left British metals.
However thanks to the preservation groups restoring 500 miles of closed lines and people clubbing together to return new steam locos to British metals thankfully equipped with modern technology! With the oversight of the government and local government initiatives, stations and lines are reopening.
The preservation movement in good old 'Titfield' fashion have shown H.M.G don't mess with 'our' railways, at long last they have seen the benefit that railway tours bring to the railway network and local councils are now supporting the preservation movement and wanting one in their own backyard. Who would have thought of Whitby having a platform added for the N.Y.M.R steam locos and summer locos running from Fort William to Mallaig. I long for the day when I will see another 500 miles of lines reopen and forty more stations built!
Beaching gets the blame for all closures, however, a lot of lines closed in the 1950s. Marples was the true villain.
All I will finally add is that I was close to tears when they closed the Bath Spa line from Bath to Bristol Temple Meads plus the line north to Gloucester and the Pines link. The beautiful station of Mangotsfield (built in a Y section of the triangle) was gutted and vandalized. Now we wish we had kept it. At least part of the track is now used by cyclist.
A lot of old station sites seemed to now have become industrial unit sites.
The North Wales borderlands line - Wrexham to Bidston line is interesting, why was it not closed? It to me seems like a throw back to a time before Beeching's axe. It may be the large steel works in Shotton (John Summers) or could it be the nuclear plant at Capenhurst (there is a small branch into the plant) that prevented closure, but I could be very wrong, who knows?
Please tell the full story. Mention of the acts of Parliament which enforced the railways to move loss making single wagon loads, while nothing similar was imposed on road hauliers might put the reality into perspective. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!!!
I needed to know why they don’t dig a tunnel and do an extension for the main line Train so that they can extend the unused abandoned underground stations.
Why couldn’t they use the part D78 Stock train doors on the sides and also restructure the front face of the A60 and A62 stock and that includes the class 313, class 314 and class 315 remix and make them all together and also redesign them an overhead line and also make them into Five cars per units and also having three Disabled Toilets on those Five cars per units A60 and A62 stock trains and also convert the A60 and A62 stock trains into a Scania N112, Volvo TD102KF, Volvo B10M, Gardner 6LXB, Gardner 6LXC and Gardner 8LXB Diesel Engines and also put the Loud 7-Speed Voith Gearboxes even Loud 8-Speed Leyland Hydra cyclic Gearboxes in the A60 and A62 stock, class 313, class 314, and class 315 and also modernise the A60 and A62 stock and make it into an 11 car per unit so it could have fewer doors, more tables, computers and mobile phone chargers.
A Stock Train and 8 Disabled Toilets on those A stock trains. why couldn’t we refurbish and modernise the waterloo and city line Triple-Track train tunnel and make it bigger and extend it to the bank station, making it into a Triple-Track Railway Line so those 4 European countries such as Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden to convert the waterloo and city line Triple-Track Train tunnel into a High-Speed train?
The Third Euro tunnel Triple-Track Train line to make it 11 times better for passengers so they could go from A to B. then put the modernised 11 car per unit A Stock and put them on a bigger modernised waterloo and city line Triple-Track train tunnel so it could go to bank station to those 4 European countries such as Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden. The modernised refurbish 11 cars per unit A stock could be a High Speed The Third Triple-Track Euro Tunnel Train So it is promising and 37 times a lot more possible to do this kind of project that is OK for London Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden.
oh by the way, could they also tunnel the Triple-Track Railway Line so it will stop from Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex so that the Passengers will go to Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden and also extend the Triple-Track Railway Line from Bank to Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex Stations so that more people from there could go to Germany, Italy, Poland And Sweden Easily.
Why couldn't they extend the Piccadilly line and also build brand-new underground train stations so it could go even further right up to Clapton, Wood Street and also make another brand new tunnel train station in Chingford could they extend the DLR.
All of the classes 150, 155, 154, 117, 114, 105, and 106, will be replaced by all of the Scania N112, Volvo TD102KF, Volvo B10M, Gardner 6LXB, Gardner 6LXC and Gardner 8LXB Diesel Five carriages three disabled toilets are air conditioning trains including Highams Park for extended roots which is the Piccadilly line and the DLR trains.
Could you also convert all of the 1973 stock trains into an air-conditioned maximum speed 78 km/hours (48 MPH) re-refurbished and make it into a 8 cars per unit if that will be alright, and also extend all of the Piccadilly train stations to make more space for all of the extended 8 car per unit 1973 stock air condition trains and can you also build another Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive Companies and they can order Every 17 Octagon and Hexagon shape LNER diagram unique small no.13 and unique minor no.11 Boilers from those Countries such as Greece, Italy, Poland, and Sweden, can they make Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive speeds by up to 117MPH so you can try and test it on the Original Mainline so it will be much more safer for the Passengers to enjoy the 117MPH speed Limit only for HS2 and Channel Tunnel mainline services, if they needed 16 Carriages Per units can they use those class 55’s, class 44’s, class 40’s and class 43HST Diesel Locomotive’s right at the Back of those 18 Carriages Per Units so they can take over at the Back to let those Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive’s have a rest for those interesting Journeys Please!!, oh can you make all of those Coal Boxes’s 16 Tonnes for all of the 117MPH Mayflower and Tornado Steam Locomotive’s so the Companies will Understand us PASSENGER’S!! so please make sure that the Builders can do as they are Told!! And please do something about these very important Professional ideas Please Prime Minister of England, the Prime Minister of Sweden, the Prime Minister of Germany, the Prime Minister of Italy, Prime Minister of Poland and that Includes the Mayor of London.
It was a long time ago but Beeching accepted an invitation from the Tory government to act as an accountant and chairman of BR in an effort to save money. He costed every line and route and simply shut one third of the railway on that basis. There's no doubt that Ernie Marples was pushing his road building programme on the expected results of railway closures.
The whole thing made the expensive modernisation exercise in the mid 1950s look like a waste of money.